Highly Polished wire????

ohmy.god@verizon.net

Since all wire is drawn by sucessive passes through very hard diamond dies, all wire has similar metalurgical properties from that process. To a great extent this is a sort of polishing - and in fact wire that has just been drawn is very bright and smooth.

After it sits about for a while it tends to oxidize. It can also oxidize as the result of heat required to melt the insulation (assuming insulated wire) which the wire is drawn into and through...

but for bare wire, yes, you could polish it with rouge or any one of a number of other common polishing compounds. Assuming they do not have any acidic or alkaline component left behind, the long term effect should be minimal due to polishing. Most "metal cleaners" have some sort of chemical component which if left behind will cause corrosion eventually.

Will polishing solid core silver wire make any sonic difference? Gee, it shouldn't, but who knows? It certainly shouldn't hurt - however you could make a very good case for polishing pure silver wire and then immediately putting it into a pure oxygen environment so that you get a uniform silver oxide coating, and no silver sulfates/ides (which one is it?) on the surface. This should yield the most stable wire - assuming that there would be a change if the wire became blackened... (the oxide being silver colored, I'm told).

At least it will look pretty. :- )

_-_-bear

IMO, removing the tarnish (oxides) from a copper or silver wire by polishing it does much more to enhance contact than to degrade it. I have used very fine sand paper (400 grit) to remove mild corrosion from certain wires in my breaker box, cable spades, and plug prongs. After cleaning the wire or contacts, I sually wipe it with a clean cloth, and the cloth sometimes shows a bit of dirtiness, so I assume I'm removing "crud". I think it sounds better after cleaning, but if not, at least it makes me feel virtuous. Cheers. Craig

On and on it goes... Now, ladies and gents, polishing is the miracle that will give you perfect sound for never! Does polishing the top of my pre-amp and power amp improve their performance? You betcha! Do you know what lies in that dust that falls all over your equipment? It actually affects the thermo-dynamics and the electro-magnetic properties of the chassis and causes great listener fatigue. I, for one, have heard the great sound improvement wrought by such a simple tweak as dusting and gentle polishing of all surfaces. I am now in the process of tweaking the toobs in my preamp with Windex, to shine' em up real nice and to stick'em back in the preamp were the sun hardly don't shine. I can hear it now! Oh that glorious crystal clear sound of polished glass! May the Gods of high-end audio always shine on you for you are true believers! I hope that the polished wire sells for way more than the mundane unpolished (impolite?) wire that went before, only then would it reach the icon level and, assuredly, provide the best sound, until something better (wackier, maybe?) comes along. Science be damned, I gotta get me some of that wire!

According to Dr. Strassner, the cable and current physicist and engineer behind HMS cables, polishing cables to a "mirror like" finish is nothing more than a marketing hype.
Like the Nordost Vlahalla cables, his copper conducters used in the Grand Finale line of cables are silver plated with a special bonding process. This is, according to him, the only way to get a good sounding conductor. And Nordost with the Valhalla and HMS with the Grand Finale cables have proven this. Audition these cables and you will understand.